Transient Sleeping in Dumpster Dies in Accident

He was a transient who made wherever he was his home--even if that was a trash bin.

To shopkeepers, the man was known as a denizen of the storefront district where Sepulveda Boulevard cuts briefly through Culver City.

“These people have seen him down and out in the neighborhood before, sleeping around and in dumpsters,” Culver City Police Detective John Dott said.

No one can say why he apparently failed to awaken Wednesday morning when the dumpster he had chosen for the night was lifted off the ground with a jerky mechanical thrust and turned upside down over the cargo bay of a Culver City trash collection truck.

“When the truck starts to pick it up, I figure that guy would wake up and probably bounce up pretty quick and say, ‘Hey guys, I’m here,’ ” a distressed Mark Gauerke, city resource and sanitation manager, said Thursday.

Gauerke conceded the grisly possibility that the man did wake up, but simply could not raise his voice over the noise of the hydraulic rams.

After a three-hour run, the truck returned to the Culver City Transfer Station at 9255 Jefferson Blvd. about 7:30 a.m. Wednesday.

Following procedure, the driver operated the hydraulic controls from the cab of the truck and the collector stood at the rear to make sure no one walked behind the hopper as it dumped its load.

Saw the Body

It was then that the collector, whose name Gauerke declined to release, saw the body come out.

The Los Angeles County coroner’s office has so far failed to locate any relatives of the 41-year-old man, and will not disclose his identity until it does, spokesman Bob Dambacher said Thursday.

An autopsy to determine the cause and time of death was performed Thursday, Dambacher said. The results were incomplete, leaving open the possibility that the man was already dead when hoisted into the truck.

A more disturbing possibility, as far as Gauerke is concerned, is that the same thing has happened before, undetected, and could happen again.

Once before, he said, a Culver City trash collection crew found a transient in a trash bin and shooed him away.

Three other close calls have been recorded by authorities. In 1984, a transient awoke in a trash truck in Los Angeles and climbed out on his own. In 1984, another transient screamed as he was being compacted and was rescued. In 1987, a 13-year-old runaway survived compaction and leaped to safety as he was being deposited in a dump outside Tulare.

Gauerke said he can think of no simple method for preventing such mishaps.

“Short of having the collector open every lid and look in every bin, which would take considerable time, I can’t think of any way to handle this,” he said.

Toni Wessell, spokeswoman for the Greater Los Angeles Solid Wastes Management Assn., said the so-far unnamed transient’s story will be published in the group’s next newsletter as an alert to private trash haulers.